Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 14, 2013 @11:39AM
from the actually-they-just-like-to-play-with-equipment dept.

It's a long, slow road from tentative discovery, to various forms of peer review, to wide acceptance, never mind theory and experimental design, but recent years' work to pin down the Higgs Boson seem to be bearing fruit in the form of cautious announcements. FBeans writes with excerpts from both the New York Times ("Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.") and from The Independent ("Cern says that confirming what type of boson the particle is could take years and that the scientists would need to return to the Large Hadron Collider — the world's largest 'atom smasher' — to carry out further tests. This will measure at what rate the particle decays and compare it with the results of predictions, as theorised by Edinburgh professor Peter Higgs 50 years ago.")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain [wikipedia.org]
A boatswain (pron.:/bosn/, formerly and dialectally also/botswen/), bo's'n, bos'n, or bosun is an unlicensed member of the deck department of a merchant ship.
I believe they exist!

The energy of the tevatron collider at Fermilab is much lower than at CERN, making it very difficult if not impossible to observe the Higgs or measure its properties there. The collider has been shut down for more than a year anyhow as they transition to other physics experiments. http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/ [fnal.gov]

The theory behind the Higgs mechanism motivated the search for the Higgs particle in the first place. It's well worked out. Check Wikipedia.

How is a Higgs Boson produced?

Practical answer: if you put enough energy in a small enough space you'll get all kinds of particles. Some of those will be Higgs'.Sciency answer: the Higgs particle is just a manifestation of a perturbation in the Higgs field, just like every other fundamental particle is a perturbation in it's own quantum field in modern quantum field theory. To produce a Higgs you pump enough energy into the Higgs field in a particular location.

Can we produce these particles at will?

If at will you mean by smashing other particles together at high speed and occasionally getting a Higgs out, yes. If you mean specifically producing a Higgs on command, no.

well, there are "fermions", after Fermi, and "bosons", after Bose, but those are the two classes of particles. There are "gluons", ending in -on, but from English "glue". Then there are the W and Z bosons, which are just letters, and the quarks...